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Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

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Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#111

Post by astura »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #107
astura wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are kids being around their peers "socially unnatural?" At the very least it's not more "socially unnatural" than posting on hacker news.

It's socially unnatural because as soon as you leave the schooling system, it stops happening.

This is incredibly ridiculous and nonsensical reasoning. In that case breastfeeding is unnatural because you stop doing it after infancy.

Beyond that, kids are around mixed age groups plenty. For me it was at afterschool programs, summer camps, dance classes, bowling, family (sibling, cousins), and playing with neighborhood kids.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#112

Post by myth_drannon »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #62
bko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I can't take you seriously with statements like this. > Class solidarity and positional maintenance are the real objectives Who's organizing all the world's corporate leaders? Who's preventing from non-infiltrated people from starting businesses? This is extremely conspiratorial > Companies will do bad things to make a profit, and on rare occasions they even do good things to make a profit Really? Rare occ…

What the parent comment is saying does apply to large corporations. I will be very specific - I worked for Fidelity. Fidelity does not need smart people for 80% of their professional positions. They need someone who can pass the FINRA Series 7/63 to get a licenses and follow procedure. Without exaggeration, there are scripts for most of the work. You don't have to follow them to the letter, but you can. Standing out…

Did you live in USSR after it collapsed? It looks like your information about that places comes from The Economist. It was nepotism + intimidation, USSR was like kindergarten in comparison. Putin & Co (for example) are not talented in any imaginable way except being good in eliminating the competitors.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#113

Post by niknoble »

austinl wrote: post #73

> Looking back on it, most of our essays were not good. They were rubbish. It makes me cringe to look back at my high school essays, like I was trying to write with a thesaurus. Thankfully, senior year, a friend who went on to write professionally edited one of my essays. He crossed out almost every adverb, and over words like "utilize", he wrote "use". It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask t…

> It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask their points with language because they have nothing to say, or are afraid to say it clearly

You're right about high schoolers using needlessly complicated writing, but this isn't why. A high schooler would use needlessly complicated writing even if he was eager to share his ideas about a topic.

The reason is that K-12 schools teach this style of writing as an aesthetic. Other parts of the aesthetic include scattering your stories with "symbols," so that they mean something other than they appear to, and exaggerating your and your characters' emotions.

A student who grows up immersed in this aesthetic would not secretly prefer a more simplistic writing style, any more than a person who grows up eating American food would secretly prefer Indian food.

Your friend was inducting you into the aesthetic of modern journalists and bloggers, but if he was instead reading the academic humanities, or if he was a time traveller from the 1950s, he would have been perfectly happy with "utilize."

Of course, plain language is better at conveying information, so I'm fully on that train myself--now that I've spent some time out of high school. But it's normal to adopt the aesthetics of your surroundings, and it's not a sign of masking anything or being afraid.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#114

Post by BeetleB »

esyir wrote: post #109
BeetleB wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. Not where I work. They hire people who they think will make them look good, and it's not always by hiring the most productive. They'll deny promotions to their most effective workers out of fear they will leave. They block transfers. Companies make…

I don't get this "promotion = leaving". I'm pretty sure there's a very sizable chunk of people leaving because they're stuck.

Not everyone is in SW where finding a job at another company is easy.

My company used to pay at the top of the market for certain fields. Leaving the company would mean a pay cut.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#115

Post by onemoresoop »

germinalphrase wrote: post #70
bko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly opposite in almost every way. Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of bus…

“Many don't even get evaluated and firing teachers is very difficult in the US” I am a high school English teacher in the US. I have two to four performance reviews every school year (each entailing a pre & post meeting along with an in-class performance evaluation). I have tenure, but the only barrier to firing me between now and next September (barring fireable offenses) is a PIP which is ultimately based on subjec…

I didn't know what rubber rooms were, here's the wiki link [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#116

Post by throw1234651234 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #112
throw1234651234 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the parent comment is saying does apply to large corporations. I will be very specific - I worked for Fidelity. Fidelity does not need smart people for 80% of their professional positions. They need someone who can pass the FINRA Series 7/63 to get a licenses and follow procedure. Without exaggeration, there are scripts for most of the work. You don't have to follow them to the letter, but you can. Standing out…

Did you live in USSR after it collapsed? It looks like your information about that places comes from The Economist. It was nepotism + intimidation, USSR was like kindergarten in comparison. Putin & Co (for example) are not talented in any imaginable way except being good in eliminating the competitors.

I am talking about normal people, not OPG members. Nor am I talking about companies riding the privatization wave and/or the exporting of natural resources OR exploiting existing heavy manufacturing. I also realize that if we navigate to the Harvard Economic Atlas for Russia, we will see that this is the bulk of the business there (https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/186/export-basket).

But, I personally know a number of guys who became directors in their 20s based on raw talent in Russian tech / e-commerce / straight up commerce companies. Despite what you said, there was a number of business opportunities there for younger people. There was also a lot of opportunities providing basic services - cellular, emergency vehicle support (coming out to change battery/tire), etc, etc. The market is too mature in the US for these "easy" businesses for young people.

Of course, we have the best funding for startups, but that's a bit of a higher bar for the average person.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#117

Post by BobbyJo »

Retric wrote: post #91
BobbyJo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perverse incentives exist. 100%. However, they are studied as a failure in the system, something to fix. They are not designed or intentionally created as part of the system as the parent comment posits.

I don’t agree with his comment and sure in a theoretical round cow in a vacuumed sort of way sure workers and managers incentives should align with company profits. My point was economists spend a lot of time investigating the mismatch because no company gets this completely correct.

Sure, and no line is completely straight, but that doesn't mean your floors aren't level enough to live on.
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